Oh, gentlemen, perhaps I really regard myself as an intelligent man only because throughout my entire life I’ve never been able to start or finish anything... Every man has some reminiscences which he would not tell to everyone, but only to his friends. He has others which he would not reveal even to his friends, but only to himself, and that in secret. But finally there are still others which a man is even afraid to tell himself...

Sunday, August 19, 2007

The Value of Latte

People are suffering, and I don't mean the upper middle class who suffer from expensive coffee shops or quadruple the price of electronic equipment when compared to the rest of the world. The average person is suffering greatly, and in effect we don’t really have an average person, we just have a huge base of poor people who are receiving inadequate education coupled with private lessons that only enable them to pass nearly obsolete tests which give them no chance of working anywhere competitively. The average person has disappeared and has been obliterated from existence. For every one thousand people getting poorer, one man gets a thousand times richer.

The real trouble is not just the suffering of these people, but their deterioration that will become our doom. The result of all the eighties movies where problems such as education, private lessons, jobs and housing were all discussed are starting to bear fruit now as we can see that the country has produced a fine bread of bitter opportunists along with helpless citizens and of course, the cream of the crop, terrorists.

I would imagine that those running the country have no love or compassion for anything or anyone around them, not even their children, for if they had some sort of compassion, they would not let the country fall to this dark and harrowing destiny. It is almost certain that their children or grand children will suffer from this chaos that they've helped create. Maybe they just intend that their children inherit their power and money, but history has shown us that the weak one now will later be strong and the strong one now can even rot in a military prison when his time has come.

Injustice breeds injustice and we've bread a lot of that. We're now harvesting some of the bitter fruit, but in time more will come. The fashion back in the day was organized revolution, but these days the fashion is some sort of vigilante revenge. I don't know where the future will take us, but what I do know is that now, the average man is suffering greatly. In one visit to a café from any of the upper middle class the amount spent is enough for one man to support himself and perhaps his family for a month. That 12 L.E cup of coffee that will soon cost 30 is a million light years away from the thoughts of those average people. Even milk purchased at the store has increased in price, and what we will have in the future is a fine generation with weak bones who are not even able to do the physical jobs that the government wants them to do.

The prices are killing people. They're struggling for the sake of the rich, and for what… for no reason. The rich are getting greedy and asking the poor to be more content with less. The country has become a consumer, it consumes all the imports and produces nothing but overpriced coffee places. The country is consuming all its resources but worse yet consuming all its people.

And here we are, sitting at cafés using the wireless internet and sipping on latte. I wish there was something more that we can do but there's a certain air of hopelessness because our worlds have been separated, we don't live in the same Egypt that Egyptians do. I'm not entirely sure how Egyptian we are because we're so distant from each other. I'm certainly very distant from that poor man who survives on what I pay in one day for going out, and I'm distant from those who seem to earn a hundred pounds for every ten they spend. We've been alienated from one another, we don't feel that we belong with one another and very soon we'll start to hate one another.

4 comments:

Will E. here in NY we have the haves and the have mores..but there's a social safety net that guarantee’s that no one shall go without:

1 shelter2 three square meals3 a degree worth more than the paper it’s printed on.

yet poor egypt is forced to bow down to the IMF and the world bank with all the privatization... gone are the days of the vaunted respected civil servant (mowasaf hikooma ad el donia) and enter the age of the blessed heroin and bango dealers hiding behind legitimate businesses.

yes zerocool, I had almost entirely forgotten about the insane amount of money that goes into drugs by both extremes of the classes the very rich folk who usually can't do without a day's supply of drugs and the very poor folk. Ironically this is one of the very few areas where both the rich and the poor meet and sometimes even get along.

Very thoughtful dude!The social gp between the different segments in Egypts grows rapidly..When I hang out and i feel that i paid alot I feel guilt towards the people who cn't afford but this feeling is neutrlized when i think about the rich people who mke millions out of thin air!!

well I've always thought our notions of fair were always skewed, so yeah.. this whole thing in fact could be fair.. I don't argue that.

It's crazy though cause I get to deal with very rich people and very poor people and I have to maintain a balance with both extremes and I can really see how much a hundred pounds means absolutely nothing to some and almost everything to others.

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